Science
Vol.297 No.5583 pp.950-953
August 9, 2002
Economic Reasons for Conserving Wild Nature
Andrew Balmford* (1), Aaron Bruner (2), Philip Cooper (3), Robert Costanza (4) Stephen Farber
(5), Rhys E. Green (6), Martin Jenkins (7), Paul Jefferiss (6), Valma Jessamy (3), Joah Madden
(1), Kat Munro (1), Norman Myers (8), Shahid Naeem (9), Jouni Paavola (3), Matthew Rayment
(6), Sergio Rosendo (3), Joan Roughgarden (10), Kate Trumper (1), R. Kerry Turner (3).
On the eve of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, it is timely to assess progress over
the 10 years since its predecessor in Rio de Janeiro. Loss and degradation of remaining natural
habitats has continued largely unabated. However, evidence has been accumulating that such
systems generate marked economic benefits, which the available data suggest exceed those
obtained from continued habitat conversion. We estimate that the overall benefit:cost ratio of an
effective global program for the conservation of remaining wild nature is at least 100:1.
(1) Conservation Biology Group, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge
CB2 3EJ, UK.
(2) Center for Applied Biodiversity Science at Conservation International, 1919 M Street, NW,
Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036, USA.
(3) Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment (CSERGE), School of
Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK.
(4) Center for Environmental Science, Biology Department and Institute for Ecological
Economics, University of Maryland, Box 38, Solomons, MD 20688, USA.
(5) Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA
15260, USA.
(6) The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, The Lodge, Sandy, Bedfordshire SG19 2DL,
UK.
(7) UN Environment Programme-World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), 219
Huntingdon Road, Cambridge CB3 ODL, UK.
(8) Green College, Woodstock Road, Oxford OX2 6HG, UK; and Upper Meadow, Old Road,
Headington, Oxford OX3 8SZ, UK.
(9) Department of Zoology, University of Washington, 24 Kincaid Hall, Box 351800, Seattle,
WA 98195-1800, USA.
(10) Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: a.balmford@zoo.cam.ac.uk
Address after Sept. 2002: Gund Institute of Ecological Economics, The University of Vermont,
Burlington, VT 05405, USA.
Humans benefit from wild nature (1) in very many ways: aesthetically and culturally; via
the provision of ecological services such as climate regulation, soil formation, and
nutrient cycling; and from the direct harvest of wild species for food, fuel, fibers, and
pharmaceuticals (2). In the face of increasing human pressures on the environment, these
benefits should act as powerful incentives to conserve nature, yet evaluating them has
proved difficult because they are mostly not captured by conventional, market-based
economic activity and analysis.
In 1997, Costanza et al. published a synthesis (3) of more than 100 attempts to value
ecosystem goods and services using a range of techniques including hedonic pricing,
contingent valuation, and replacement cost methods (4). Using case studies to derive
average values per hectare for each of 17 services across 16 biomes and then
extrapolating to the globe by multiplying by each biome's area, the Costanza team
estimated the aggregated annual value of nature's services (updated to 2000 US$) to lie in
the range of $18 trillion to $61 trillion (1012), around a rough average of ~$38 trillion.
These figures are of similar size to global gross national product (GNP), but have been
criticized by some in the economic community (5-9).
One problem is that such macroeconomic extrapolations are inconsistent with
microeconomic theory: extrapolation from the margin to a global total should incorporate
knowledge about the shape of the demand curve (3, 5-8). In practice, it is very likely that
per-unit demand for nonsubstitutable services escalates rapidly as supply diminishes, so
that simple grossing-up of marginal values (as is also done in calculating GNP from
prices) will probably underestimate true total values. On the other hand, high local values
of services such as tourism may not be maintained if extrapolated worldwide. In addition,
while some policy decisions are made using macroeconomic indicators, many others are
made at the margin, and so are more appropriately informed by marginal rather than total
valuations (9). Another problem with the original estimate is that landscapes can yield
substantial (albeit rather different) flows of goods and services after, as well as before,
conversion by humans (which is of course why people convert them). A clearer picture of
the value of retaining habitat in relatively undisturbed condition might therefore be
obtained by estimating not the gross values of the benefits provided by natural biomes,
but rather the difference in benefit flows between relatively intact and converted versions
of those biomes.
Net Marginal Benefits
To address these concerns, we reviewed more than 300 case studies, searching for
matched estimates of the marginal values of goods and services delivered by a biome
when relatively intact, and when converted to typical forms of human use. To ensure we
did not neglect private benefits of conversion, studies were only included if they covered
the most important marketed goods, as well as one or more nonmarketed services
delivering local social or global benefits. We cross-validated figures for individual goods
and services with other estimates from similar places. Finally, we checked that the
comparisons across different states of a biome used the same valuation techniques for
particular goods and services. Our survey uncovered only five examples that met all these
criteria. Here, we summarize their findings, with all figures expressed as net present
values (NPVs, in 2000 US$ ha-1), and using the discount rates considered by the authors
[see Fig. 1 and supplemental online material (10) for further details].
Fig. 1. The marginal benefits of retaining and converting natural habitats, expressed as NPV (in
2000 US$ ha-1) calculated using the discount rates and time horizons presented. Values of
measured goods and services delivered when habitats are relatively intact and when converted are
plotted as green and black columns, respectively. [From (11-15); see (10) for further details.]
[View Larger Version of this Image (47K GIF file)]
Two studies quantified net marginal benefits of different human uses of tropical forest
areas. Kumari compared the values obtained from timber plus a suite of nontimber forest
products (NTFPs), as well as the values of water supply and regulation, recreation, and
the maintenance of carbon stocks and endangered species, for forests under a range of
management regimes in Selangor, Malaysia (11). Compared with two methods of
reduced-impact logging, high-intensity, unsustainable logging was associated with
greater private benefits through timber harvesting (at least at high discount rates and over
one harvesting cycle), but reduced social and global benefits (through loss of NTFPs,
flood protection, carbon stocks, and endangered species). Summed together, the total
economic value (TEV) of forest was some 14% greater when placed under more
sustainable management (at ~$13,000 compared with $11,200 ha-1).
A study from Mount Cameroon, Cameroon, comparing low-impact logging with more
extreme land-use change again found that private benefits favor conversion, this time to
small-scale agriculture (12). However, a second alternative to retaining the forest,
conversion to oil palm and rubber plantations, in fact yielded negative private benefits
once the effect of market distortions was removed. Social benefits from NTFPs,
sedimentation control, and flood prevention were highest under sustainable forestry, as
were global benefits from carbon storage and a range of option, bequest, and existence
values. Overall, the TEV of sustainable forestry was 18% greater than that of small-scale
farming (~$2570 compared with $2110 ha -1), whereas plantations had a negative TEV.
Three other biomes yielded single studies meeting our criteria. Analysis of a mangrove
system in Thailand revealed that conversion for aquaculture made sense in terms of shortterm private benefits, but not once external costs were factored in (13). The global
benefits of carbon sequestration were considered to be similar in intact and degraded
systems. However, the substantial social benefits associated with the original mangrove
cover--from timber, charcoal, NTFPs, offshore fisheries, and storm protection--fell to
almost zero following conversion. Summing all measured goods and services, the TEV of
intact mangroves exceeded that of shrimp farming by around 70% (~$60,400 compared
with $16,700 ha-1). van Vuuren and Roy (14) reported that draining freshwater marshes
in one of Canada's most productive agricultural areas yielded net private benefits (in large
part because of substantial drainage subsidies). However, social benefits of retaining
wetlands, arising from sustainable hunting, angling, and trapping, greatly exceeded
agricultural gains. Consequently, for all three marsh types considered, TEVs were higher
when the wetlands remained intact, exceeding figures for conversion by a mean of around
60% (~$8800 compared with $3700 ha-1). Finally, a synthesis of economic studies
examining Philippine reef exploitation demonstrated that despite high initial benefits,
destructive techniques such as blast fishing had a far lower NPV of private benefits than
did sustainable fishing (15). The social benefits of sustainable exploitation, arising from
coastal protection and tourism, were also lost upon dynamiting reefs. As a consequence,
the TEV of retaining an essentially intact reef was almost 75% higher than that of
destructive fishing (at ~$3300 compared with $870 ha-1).
One clear message from our survey is the paucity of empirical data on the central
question of the changes in delivery of goods and services arising from the conversion of
natural habitats for human use. For 10 of the largely natural biomes (including
rangelands, temperate forests, rivers and lakes, and most marine systems) in Costanza et
al. (3), we found no studies that met all of our criteria. For the four biomes which were
analyzed, only a handful of well-established ecosystem services were considered, and
some particularly valuable services, such as nutrient cycling, waste treatment, and the
provision of cultural values, were not examined at all.
Despite the limited data, our review also suggests a second broad finding: in every case
examined, the loss of nonmarketed services outweighs the marketed marginal benefits of
conversion, often by a considerable amount. Across the four biomes studied, mean losses
in TEV due to conversion run at roughly one-half of the TEV of relatively intact systems
(mean = 54.9%; SE = 13.4%; n = 4). This is certainly not to say that conversion has never
been economically beneficial; in most instances, past clearance of forests and wetlands
for prime agricultural land and other forms of development probably benefited society as
a whole. But unless the present case studies or the range of services and biomes examined
in the literature are extremely unrepresentative (and we know of no reason why this
should be the case), our synthesis indicates that at present, conversion of remaining
habitat for agriculture, aquaculture, or forestry often does not make sense from the
perspective of global sustainability.
Continuing Losses
These results therefore provide a clear and compelling economic case, alongside
sociocultural and moral arguments (16-18), for us to strengthen attempts to conserve
what remains of natural ecosystems.
Yet, when we summarized available estimates of recent trends in the global status of
natural habitats and free-ranging vertebrate populations, we found that although key data
are again disturbingly scarce, they show that rates of conversion are high across most
biomes (10). We included in our survey any estimate of global trend in habitat cover
based on a series which began in 1970 or later and included a period of at least 5 years
after the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de
Janeiro. We supplemented this with biome-specific indices based on time-series data on
populations of wild vertebrates, derived from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) 2000
Living Planet Index (LPI) and UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) fisheries
data (19, 20). For three biomes, we found two estimates derived by different methods and
from either largely or wholly independent data. In each case, the two estimates were
remarkably similar (10), and so were averaged to yield single estimates of rates of
change. Data such as these, quantifying trends in areal coverage and in populations, in
some ways provide a more tractable measure of the scale of the ongoing crisis facing
nature than do estimates of extinction rates, which are harder to document and more
difficult to link to monetary values.
Overall, we found that five of the six biomes measured have experienced net losses since
the Rio summit, with the mean rate of change across all measured biomes running at 1.2% per year, or -11.4% over the decade (Fig.2) (10). Hence, the capacity of natural
systems to deliver goods and services upon which we depend is decreasing markedly.
Costing the overall value of these losses is fraught with the problems of extrapolation and
data availability already discussed. Nevertheless, it is sobering to calculate that if the
aggregate figures of Costanza et al. (3) and our estimate of the proportion of TEV lost
through habitat change are roughly representative, a single year's habitat conversion costs
the human enterprise, in net terms, of the order of $250 billion that year, and every year
into the future (10). Why then is widespread habitat loss still happening, and what can we
do about it?
Fig. 2. Recent global estimates of the annual rate of change in area or the abundance of associated
vertebrate populations for six biomes. Note that the biomes that have declined deliver valuable
ecosystem services (3). *Values plotted are the mean of habitat and population-based estimates;
little confidence can be attached to this value (10). [View Larger Version of this Image (48K GIF
file)]
Reasons for Continued Conversion
In economic terms, our case studies illustrate three broad, interrelated reasons why the
planet is continuing to lose natural ecosystems despite their overall benefits to society
(21).
First, there are often failures of information. For many services, there is a lack of
valuations of their provision by natural systems, and particularly of changes in this
provision as human impacts increase. Although this is an understandable reflection of
substantial technical difficulties, we believe that future work needs to compare delivery
of multiple services across a range of competing land uses if it is to better inform policy
decisions. Our examples show that even when only a few ecosystem services are
considered, their loss upon conversion typically outweighs any gains in marketed
benefits.
Second, these findings highlight the fundamental role of market failures in driving habitat
loss. In most of the cases we studied, the major benefits associated with retaining systems
more or less intact are nonmarketed externalities, accruing to society at local and global
scales. Conversion generally makes narrow economic sense, because such external
benefits [or related external costs, as in the case of the damage caused by shrimp farming
(13)] have very little impact on those standing to gain immediate private benefits from
land-use change. Hence, conserving relatively intact habitats will often require
compensatory mechanisms to mitigate the impact of private, local benefits foregone,
especially in developing countries. We see the development of market instruments that
capture at a private level the social and global values of relatively undisturbed
ecosystems--for instance, through carbon or biodiversity credits or through premium
pricing for sustainably harvested wild-caught fish or timber (22, 23)--as a crucial step
toward sustainability.
Third, the private benefits of conversion are often exaggerated by intervention failures. In
the Cameroon study, for example, forests were cleared for plantations because of private
benefits arising from government tax incentives and subsidies (12). The same is true for
the Canadian wetland example (14), as well as for many other wetlands across the United
States and Europe (24). While over the short term these programs may be rational with
respect to public or private policy objectives, over the longer term many result in both
economic inefficiency and the erosion of natural services. Globally, the subset of
subsidies which are both economically and ecologically perverse totals between $950
billion and $1950 billion each year [depending on whether the hidden subsidies of
external costs are also factored in (25, 26)]. Identifying and then working to remove these
distortions would simultaneously reduce rates of habitat loss, free up public funds for
investing in sustainable resource use, and save money (25-27).
Costing Conservation
Tackling these underlying economic problems requires action on many levels, but should
in due course result in public and private decision-makers acting to reduce conversion of
remaining habitats worldwide. More immediately, given concerns about the practicalities
of exploiting natural resources sustainably, one of the most important strategies to
safeguard relatively intact ecosystems is the maintenance of remaining habitats in
protected areas. This costs money, and predictably, our current undervaluation of nature
is reflected in marked underinvestment in reserves. To the best of our knowledge, the
world spends (in 2000 US$) ~$6.5 billion each year on the existing reserve network (28).
Yet, half of this is spent in the United States alone. Globally, despite increased
expenditure since the Rio Summit by both international institutions and private
foundations, available resources for existing reserves fall far short of those needed to
meet basic management objectives (29). Moreover, terrestrial and marine reserves
currently cover only around 7.9% and 0.5% of Earth's land and sea area, respectively (30,
31), well below the minimum safe standard considered necessary for the task of
maintaining wild nature into the future (32-34).
To estimate the resources needed to meet this shortfall on land, we reworked recent
calculations (28, 35) of the costs of properly managing existing terrestrial protected areas
and expanding the network to cover around 15% of land area in each region. We found
that a globally effective network would require an approximate annual outlay of between
~$20 billion and $28 billion [including payments to meet private opportunity costs
imposed by existing and new reserves, spread out over 10 and 30 years, respectively
(10)]. New work derived from the costs of existing marine reserves suggests that an
equivalent initiative for the world's seas, this time covering 30% of total area (34, 36),
would cost at most ~$23 billion/year in recurrent costs, plus ~$6 billion/year (over 30
years) in start-up costs (10). The estimated mean total cost of an effective, global reserve
program on land and at sea is some $45 billion/year. This sum dwarfs the current $6.5
billion annual reserve budget, yet could be readily met by redirecting less than 5% of
existing perverse subsidies (25, 26).
The crucial question is whether this is a price worth paying. Although limited data make
the answer imprecise, they indicate that conservation in reserves represents a strikingly
good bargain. We assumed that the mean proportional loss of value upon conversion
recorded in our case studies is representative of all biomes and services, and that previous
gross per-hectare values of those services are roughly correct (3). If these assumptions are
valid, then our hypothetical global reserve network would ensure the delivery of goods
and services with an annual value (net of benefits from conversion) of between ~$4400
billion and $5200 billion, depending on the level of resource use permitted within
protected areas, and with the lower number coming from a network entirely composed of
strictly protected reserves [for working, see (10)]. The benefit:cost ratio of a reserve
system meeting minimum safe standards is therefore around 100:1. Put another way, the
case studies, the service values of Costanza et al. (3), or our reserve costs would have to
be off by a factor of 100 for the reserve program envisaged to not make economic sense.
We consider errors of this size to be highly unlikely, because most of our assumptions are
conservative [for other sensitivity analyses, see (10)]. For example, in terms of the values
of services, we assume that unit values will not increase as supply diminishes, that nature
reserves do not increase the flow of services beyond their boundaries [whereas some
clearly can (34, 37)], and that all of a biome's services not included in the Costanza et al.
survey (3) are worthless. On the reserve costs side, we assume that management costs do
not decrease once local communities' private opportunity costs are met, and that
expanding reserve systems yield no cost savings through economies of scale or
dissemination of best practice. Because all of these assumptions are biased against
conservation, we consider our 100:1 ratio as a low estimate of the likely benefits of
effective conservation.
Development and Wild Nature
In advocating greatly increased funding for the maintenance of natural ecosystems, we
are not arguing against development. Given forecast increases in the human population of
more than three billion by 2050 (38) and the fact that some 1.2 billion people still live on
less than 1 US$/day (39), development is clearly essential. However, current
development trajectories are self-evidently not delivering human benefits in the way that
they should: income disparity worldwide is increasing and most countries are not on track
to meet the United Nations' goals for human development and poverty eradication by
2015 (39). Our findings show one compelling reason why this is the case: our relentless
conversion and degradation of remaining natural habitats is eroding overall human
welfare for short-term private gain. In these circumstances, retaining as much as possible
of what remains of wild nature through a judicious combination of sustainable use,
conservation, and, where necessary, compensation for resulting opportunity costs [as
called for at the Rio Summit (40)] makes overwhelming economic as well as moral sense.
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1. By "wild nature" we mean habitat in which biodiversity, nonbiotic components, and
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Because our focus is on wild nature, we excluded the cropland and urban biomes when
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